Review of Sylvia Walby, Crisis, Polity: Cambridge, 2015.

Appeared in European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 57 (2016), No. 3, 563-567.

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Appeared in Constellations, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2016, 621-623.

Review of David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2015.

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Review of Martin Sandbu, Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2015

Appeared in London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 7, March 2016, pp. 7-10

Europe is falling apart, destroyed by its most devoted fans, the Germans. In the summer of 2015, having humiliated the Greeks by forcing another reform diktat down their throats, Angela Merkel started a new game, aimed at diverting attention from the economic and political disaster monetary union had become. Abrupt changes of policy are nothing new to Merkel, who is best described as a postmodern politician with a premodern, Machiavellian contempt for both causes and people. Having made her party adopt a radically neoliberal, deregulationist anti-labour platform in 2003, she barely escaped defeat two years later at the hands of Gerhard Schroeder. When she became chancellor, she used her office and the Grand Coalition with the post-Schroeder Social Democratic Party (SPD) to purge her own party of neoliberalism and neoliberals, and social-democratise it beyond recognition. In 2011, after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, which received extensive media coverage in Germany, it took Merkel, then known as the Atomkanzlerin, no more than a few days to order the immediate closure of eight nuclear power plants and to initiate legislation to end all nuclear power generation by 2022 at the latest. This was only a few months after she had, with much political arm-twisting, got the Bundestag to repeal the nuclear phase-out passed by the Red-Green coalition in 2001, and to extend the operating licences of German nuclear plants by an average of ten years. (…) Continue

To appear in Labor History, 2015

There has hardly been a book recently whose strengths and weaknesses have been as extensively discussed as Thomas Piketty’s „Capital in the Twenty-First Century“ (2014).[1] I have little to add to the Marxist critique that Piketty’s concept of capital is somehow underdeveloped, or to Piketty’s quite reasonable response to it. Nor will I repeat that Piketty may be underestimating the role of trade unions and collective bargaining in the era of the Great Compression between the First World War and the mid-1970s, when unions and the institutions that sustained them began to be rolled back. Instead I begin by reminding readers of some of the book’s unquestionable merits: the fact that it focusses on the commonalities rather than the differences between the countries of advanced capitalism; its emphasis on the basically unearned nature of great wealth; the attention it rightly pays to the impact of the two world wars (with, among other things, the great upswing in trade union organization and trade union rights in the two „postwar settlements“); its rejection of the „convergence thesis“, according to which capitalism will on its own even out social and economic inequality through, among other things, competition (in fact, Piketty impressively proves the presence in capitalism of what Robert K. Merton has once called the „Matthew effect;“[2] Merton 1968); and the observation that large wealth can expect to draw a better rate of return than small savings, due to its access to more sophisticated financial advice. Weiterlesen →

Review of Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso: London and New York, 2013

New Left Review, Vol. 88, July and August 2014, pp. 121-129

Much of what is now mainstream political science tends to be rather boring. Following the lead of American departments and journals, research on issues of real intrinsic interest, such as the changing character of political parties, seems to be stuck in endless attempts to model the choice between office-seeking and policy-seeking, the interaction between ‘vote-maximizing’ parties and ‘utility-maximizing’ voters, the organization of voter preferences or the dynamics of coalition formation — all in timelessly general property spaces, designed to lend themselves to representation by complex sets of formal equations.

There are, however, exceptions. Among the most remarkable of these, until his untimely death in the summer of 2011, was Peter Mair, professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. Widely respected, especially on the European side of his profession, Mair preserved a keen understanding of both the history and the purpose of the study of democracy. (…)

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